Margot Fonteyn by Meredith Daneman. REVIEWED BY PAUL BAILEY for The Sunday Times

Thirteen years after her death, the great British ballerina has the biography she deserves. Meredith Daneman’s book is long, but not excessively so, because Margot Fonteyn’s illustrious career was dependent on three other people: her formidable mother, Hilda Hookham, known as Nita; Ninette de Valois, the dominant force behind the Sadler’s Wells Ballet; and Frederick Ashton, the choreographer who best knew her strengths and limitations. Without this trio, she might have remained Peggy Hookham, an olive-skinned girl with lustrous dark eyes and only average intelligence.

When Britain's Sadler's Wells Ballet came to the old Metropolitan Opera House in 1955, my roommates and I (dancers all three) took turns all day standing in a line that snaked around the block. What I remember most vividly from that evening's performance was Margot Fonteyn in Mikhail Fokine's "Firebird." We were used to Maria Tallchief's cool, steely power in George Balanchine's version of the work. Fonteyn, wearing a veritable chieftain's war bonnet of red feathers, was a leaping, quivering flame -- passionate yet not fully human. Half a century later, I learn from Meredith Daneman's new biography, Margot Fonteyn: A Life, that the role's creator, Tamara Karsavina, had pressed the English dancer to this characterization: "You are a wild bird, Margot," Karsavina told her, "you've never felt a human hand on your body before, you've never been caught and it's terrible." That's what Fonteyn showed us that night.

Before becoming a novelist, Daneman was a Royal Ballet-trained dancer with Australian Ballet and this inside knowledge, combined with her obvious passion for her subject, earned her the trust and co-operation of Fonteyn's friends, family and colleagues.

The legend was inherent from the beginning. Her first partner, the flamboyant homosexual, Robert Helpmann, who later became one of her many lovers, remarked: "She had the curious quality of making you want to cry."

Although I have just begun reading the Daneman biography of Margot Fonteyn and havn’t yet got as far as the 1960’s, I must say that I am disappointed to discover from the Robert Gottlieb review that the blame of the first night casting for MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet is being laid at Fonteyn’s door.

In his book In House which details his long career with the Royal Opera House, former General Administrator, John Tooley, tells us that it was Sol Hurok who was responsible for the Royal Ballet being forced to drop Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable in favour of Fonteyn and Nureyev. And if anyone knows the truth of the matter then surely it must be Tooley.

Norman Lebrecht, in his book Covent Garden: The Inside Story, also writes about Hurok’s intervention on the grounds of box office receipts, he is intrigued though, that nothing relating to this incident could be found in the ROH archives. Rather more interestingly LeBrecht also reprimands MacMillan himself for not standing up to the management decision and tells us that MacMillan had lost interest in the Seymour/Gable partnership around that time, but was forced to reinstate them as a partnership after De Valois’s intercession on their behalf.

In her bibliography Daneman lists the Tooley book, but not the Lebrecht one.

The idea that Fonteyn (or any other dancer for that matter) had the power to dictate artistic policy at Covent Garden always struck me as absurd and with so much reliable information pointing to Hurok as the villain in this episode it’s a great shame that Fonteyn is being used as a scapegoat in this way.

Meredith Daneman's ''Margot Fonteyn'' has captured what few know: the heartbreak behind the heroine. Daneman, herself a former professional dancer and the author of four novels, has written the definitive book on this icon beloved of balletomanes around the world.

Though Daneman doggedly hauls aspects of them into view and pontificates upon them, her sensibilities, thinking, and writing style are insufficiently sophisticated for the task of making Fonteyn live on paper.

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